


To Infinity and Beyond

by stepquietly



Category: Swimming RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Stargate Atlantis, Broning, Humor, M/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-01
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2018-01-14 04:17:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1252459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stepquietly/pseuds/stepquietly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The problem with hanging out with Lochte is that everyone starts to believe that Michael is somehow responsible for handling all of Lochte’s weirdness and assorted douchery - yeah, some of his own too, whatever - so Michael keeps getting pulled aside and told to make Lochte stop using Atlantis’ preference for his gene to turn the eastern conference room into a club, complete with strobe light and hip-bumping beats.</p><p>(The Swimming RPF SGA AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Infinity and Beyond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bessyboo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessyboo/gifts), [War_Kitten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/War_Kitten/gifts).



> Thanks go to [](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/missmollyetc/profile)[](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/missmollyetc/)**missmollyetc** for the beta. 
> 
> This fic, for all that it's Lochte/Phelps, is also my ode to Vir Khade. Khade might not have managed to medal at the Olympics, but he put India back on the map by scoring our first medal in the Asian Games in 24 years. He's a precious baby and only 22! I have so many feelings about him, it's ridiculous!

Michael doesn’t even know why he’s here.

It’s not just that he’s still smarting from the month or so of prolonged exposure to all the assholes on the Daedalus, or that he’s been dragged away from staking out one of the rooms for his lab - and if he goes back to find those horticulturists have taken over the smaller conservatory he’s going to _kill_ someone - but more that they’ve all managed to survive the ages it’s taken to get out here, so the law of probability says that stuff is likely about to go to shit. Michael wouldn’t mind being very far away when that happens.

Besides, paleobotany has nothing to do with a giant room and a dusty chair, other than the fact that Michael might sit in the chair until someone shows him the plant samples he needs to analyse. The rest of the botanists are just lurking about the edges of the room now, unsure, and if Dr. Bowman hadn’t threatened to cut off their balls if one of them even _thought_ about the chair, there likely would’ve been some squabbling over the hierarchy of who got to use it. As it is, the whole thing is stupid and it’s boring. Michael just wants a bed and his lab already, preferably in that order.

Dr. Bowman, General Troy, and some of the lead scientists are over in a corner, arms flailing as they gesture wildly. More than one of them has been shooting the chair the sort of covetous looks they’d normally reserve for soft touch benefactors and multi-stage research grants, but they make no real move towards it. There’s some talk of probability theories and just a little hair-pulling, but nothing Michael hasn’t seen played out before next to a nice buffet table.

“ _Abbe, kaddu ke aulaad_ *, we’ve already tried to assess its components,” Dr. Khade hisses, brandishing his clipboard like he’s about to beat Troy’s head in. “The whole point is that we don’t understand what the power source is. It’s inert as far as we can tell.”

Troy looks like he’s about to pluck every hair of Khade’s head and force him to eat them, he’s so mad. “It can’t just be a chair though. You were the one who spent all this time talking about the way the city’s laid out and how this is the nexus of its energy bases. So I’ll remind you that this was _your_ idea, and if you weren’t such a charlatan -- ”

Cseh tries to insert himself between them before they come to blows. “Look, a bunch of the younger scientists sat on it before they thought any better and nothing happened,” he says, and Bowman puts a hand over his eyes that seems to indicate an incipient migraine from all the posturing and idiocy in the room.

“I could’ve told you that! _Ghadav_ **!” Khade whispers, though he’s subsiding under Cseh’s grave look.

The bickering continues, everyone talking over each other, their voices rising and falling and echoing around the room. It’s so mundane that Michael actually starts to relax and consider the possibility that the warning feeling he’s got in his gut is wrong. Maybe he really is a paranoid motherfucker, just like Hilary’s been insisting for years --

Except, no, he’s totally not, because right then one of the military grunts who came over with them – ‘Call me Reezy,’ he’d said, looking as blond and blue-eyed as a cherub - calls out, “oh, super awesome, the aliens in this place made themselves a lazyboy,” and proceeds to _collapse right into the chair_.

Everyone freezes. Michael actually feels his balls trying to jump back into his body because wow, Bowman is going to _kill_ this guy. Then, suddenly the city brightens and starts powering up like Call-Me-Reezy’s ass was the magical key in the cushiony lock, and everyone unfreezes to look around at the city finally waking up around them.

“Okay, that hasn’t happened before,” Kromowidjojo whispers from where she’s huddled with Cseh. The two of them look around like they’re afraid that any loud noises will stop whatever’s happening. She’s mostly gaping at the walls, and the panels that seem to be lighting up in some sort of sequence, her pencil flying over her notepad without her looking down. Cseh’s all but pressed up against one of the panels, fondling it as though that will somehow get it to reveal all the hidden technology humming just beneath its shiny, smooth patina.

Michael, for his part, continues to stay out of the way, stays close enough to the door in case he needs a quick escape, and watches the others gather around the chair.

“He, he didn’t blow up,” Khade croaks out, though he actually sounds sort of disappointed. He’s still clutching his clipboard to his chest, fingers white-knuckled.

“No, he didn’t,” Troy says, exasperated, “but he’s going to wish he had.” He rubs at his head like he can already see the paperwork it’s going to take to explain away all the multiple breaches in protocol. He bellows, “Lochte, front and centre!” And Lochte, looking confused, gets off the chair.

The city immediately dims, like Michael’s magical ass-key metaphor wasn’t actually that far from the truth, and Kromowidjojo makes a semi-wounded noise in her throat while she scribbles equations frantically.

“General Troy,” Bowman says, voice soft. He and Troy stare at each other and nod a lot while looking meaningful and secretive, and communicating solely via twitches of their glasses, raised eyebrows and pursed lips. Eventually they seem to come to a resolution, and Troy sighs when he says, “Lochte, sit back down.”

Lochte continues to look confused, but he sits.

And Atlantis brightens again, the whole place feeling like it’s shaking off non-existent cobwebs. For his part, Lochte doesn’t look confused anymore. He calls out, “Hey, the power’s back up!” and smiles like he’s thrilled. He smiles around the room. “Pretty fancy, right?”

There’s actually a pretty cool display with a bunch of flashing lights then, almost like the walls are showing off for Lochte. Cseh looks like he’s about two minutes from crying with glee and Kromowidjojo hasn’t looked down at her papers yet though her hand moves over them frantically, writing as quick as the thoughts come to her.

Bowman just smiles and adjusts his glasses in a way that Michael knows indicates great satisfaction for all that it barely crinkles his eyes. He’s staring up at the room’s ceiling and Michael looks up now enough to note that it’s some sort of 3D display set, appearing somehow without wiring or frame, just pulled out of thin air. It might’ve been just the basics of a bare entertainment system for the Ancients for all that he knows, and Michael’s swept by the thought of all of them standing here, in this slowly awakening city that’s had all its fancy bells and whistles abandoned somehow.

“Corporal Lochte. Er, Ryan, ” Bowman says - and Michael has a brief second in which he looks back over and thinks, _oh thank god, his name isn’t_ actually _Reezy_ \- before Lochte looks over at Bowman, “I need you to focus now. Can you imagine where we are in the universe for us?”

Lochte nods gamely, and squints. The display flares and brightens before a couple of shapes start to appear. Michael watches, impressed despite himself, while they resolve into a set of images, though he’s rapidly less impressed when these resolve into what look like rocks, a large blur that might be either a really impressive dildo or the Empire State Building, and a green, black, and orange haze that looks pretty distinctly like Duck Dodgers.

The red cape comes into focus a second later, and Michael has to close his eyes before he loses it.

“Is that a duck?” One of the other scientists asks, and Lochte might look shamefaced, but that’s... Okay, yup, that’s totally a cartoon spaceship.

Michael cracks up, tries to back away so he’s not in anyone’s direct line of sight while they all stare at Lochte with various levels of fascination and horror. Lochte grins at them, sort of pleased and appalled, like a kid who’s doing something hilarious even while he knows it’s going to get him in trouble. A vague image of Marvin the Martian starts to materialize next to the duck, and Michael completely gives up on not being noticed and openly wheezes with laughter.

General Troy rubs his temples like he’s got a headache coming on. “Corporal,” he starts, and then seems to be at a loss for words.

Khade jumps in. “Don’t worry so much. Just think of something you know.”

Troy makes a sort of ‘get on with it’ motion, and Lochte begins to look actually shamefaced. He says, “Sorry, sir,” sincere, and closes his eyes, seems to really focus. And Michael can see it unfold out of the dark of the screen - a bunch of stars, and then a ladder of candy stripes, and yup, there’s the American flag up on their ceiling.

Khade snorts and mutters “Typical” under his breath, and some of the other techs nod, but about half of the room stares up at it with their mouths open, awed.

When Michael looks over, Lochte’s got this expression of resolved glee that melts slowly into wonder as the image sharpens, spreads so it’s like a blanket over their heads. Lochte salutes it, and Michael rolls his eyes even as he grins, fond and ever so slightly homesick.

* * *

 

Unfortunately, that’s when they figure out that the ATA gene is sort of essential if they want to actually be able to survive and work in Atlantis.

In a flash of brilliant political strategy, the geneticists marshal under Dr. Rūta Meilutytė and use this as a reason to stage a coup that nets them one of the fanciest rooms in the set staked out for labspace. Triumphant, they disappear for days, only emerging periodically, wild-eyed and messy haired, to beg for food in the mess.

At one point Dr. César Cielo is found roaming the halls, lost, but somehow holding about two months worth of MREs and four contraband chocolate bars. There’s a short war between the kitchen staff and the geneticists then, like two dogs fighting for dominance. In the end, General Troy has to wade in and actually set up the negotiations that see the MREs get confiscated but the geneticists keep the chocolate by right of conquest.

Later, there’s a brief struggle for power between the physicians who’ll be implementing the gene treatment and the geneticists designing it, but the whole thing becomes somewhat moot once they figure out that all they really need is synthesized plasma and a couple of syringes.

Michael keeps his head down through the worst of it. He spends most of his time wallowing in the fact that tiny labspace or not, he’s got an entire greenhouse full of withered, semi-fossilized plants and their pollen to wander through. His days are mostly spent trying to categorize them by cellular structure, cross-referencing with the other botanists working on the taxology and systems ecology to see what they can work with if they decide to even try re-pollinating with some of this stuff.

It’s _fascinating_. In fact, it’s fascinating enough that Michael finds that he can’t stop talking about it. It’s like being an excited teenager about to go on his first big date again, except this has marginally less nausea and way more protective gear.

He knows he’s sort of overselling his enthusiasm, but he can’t seem to help it. It’s not like he doesn’t see people’s eyes glaze over but he’s here, at the frontier of a new world, elbow deep in the pasts of their soil, and it’s the best thing he’s ever done. He could very well be a pariah when it comes to company in the mess hall, but it’s worth the risk if he gets to tell someone about how the lycopods they discovered on the mainland aren’t actually related to any of the vegetation there.

“It’s like they were just placed there after,” he tells Cielo, who quirks an eyebrow at him but says nothing. Cielo abandons him the next day to go sit with the soldiers, seemingly drawn in by Captain Bernard’s legitimately giant shoulders and boyish grin. Or at least that’s what Michael thinks when he finds himself alone, tucked away in a small table in the corner of the hall.

It’s where Lochte finds him hunched over his latest notes, sandwich forgotten at his elbow while he works through whether or not trying to date these fossils could even work given their lack of relevant data. He ends up trying to explain about his latest discovery regarding the stuff they found in Greenhouse 52, and Lochte listens, though Michael has some doubts about whether or not he’s actually grasping the importance of his research here given that Lochte snorts every time Michael talks about the importance of dating his fossils.

But then, heck, after a while Michael’s snorting too because that shit’s hilarious.

* * *

 

They end up hanging out whenever they’ve got the time, and Michael confirms for himself that Lochte is pretty much a frat boy in uniform. Lochte has a startling array of dick jokes, and hasn’t met a single pun about geologists rocking your world that he doesn’t love and repeat with every indication of childish glee.

Case in point: Michael’s started work on a new set of fossils and they’ve been confounding him all week, but he’s finally had a breakthrough. Lochte and he meet up outside of the gate room and the two of them wander down to the mess. The place is mostly empty since its way past lunch time, and Michael nods at the people he recognizes while he and Lochte fill their trays and sit at their usual tiny corner table.

“I wasn’t sure until Piersol came back with the results, but I’m pretty sure now that they’re angiosperms,” Michael tells him. “Isn’t that amazing? Man, I _love_ this stuff.”

Lochte laughs so hard he drops half his strawberry milkshake out of the pouch and directly onto his BDUs. “Dude, don’t tell me about how much you love your spermy plants! I’m pretty sure you don’t have to take shit that far.”

Michael gives him _a look_ , but Lochte’s gone, totally gone, frothing pink milky bubbles while he laughs.

“Angiosperms mean the plants have flowers,” he informs Lochte snottily, but then he hears himself and ends up snorting out a laugh too. Lochte’s shitty frat boy humour must be contagious because Michael finds himself saying, “I’ve been examining its flower all day,” and glee opens up on Lochte’s face, and he’s pretty sure he looks just as ridiculously amused.

“Dude, plants are _filthy_ ,” Lochte says, awed, and holds his fist out for Michael to bump. “Tell me again about all those nuts you’ve been gathering up to grope in your lab.” He gestures with his other hand like he’s holding a ball, and Michael snorts even while he rolls his eyes.

He shakes his head even while he bumps Lochte’s fist. “You’re a weirdo,” he tells him.

“You love it,” Lochte shoots back, smiling smugly across the table while he steals the remnants of Michael’s plain cheese sandwich. “You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself without me.”

Lochte’s still got milkshake dribbles down his front. He’s torn off the crusts of his peanut butter sandwich and put them aside, and Michael feels a sudden rush of fondness for all of Lochte’s assorted ridiculousness well up inside him.

“Shut up,” he lamely retorts. Then, happy with a day of exciting new research developments and filled with the strawberry milk of human kindness, he asks “Lochte, man, you wanna go get high?”

Lochte looks up at him, wide blue eyes and short messy curls, and grins so Michael can see the mashed up mess of his cheese sandwich in the midst of his teeth. Lochte closes his mouth and swallows, drums his hands on the table and finger guns at Michael. “Uh, _jeah_! And dude, I keep telling you, call me Reezy. Or, like, the Lochtenator; call me that.”

“I’d rather die,” Michael tells him quite seriously.

* * *

 

It’s the start of a not so beautiful friendship for the two of them. Lochte hasn’t met a food group he couldn’t spill on himself, and Michael ends up catching something from one of his fossils that gives him occasionally hilarious but mostly embarrassing gas. Whatever, they’re cool, and whenever Lochte gets some time off patrol and Michael’s managed to convince Dr. Bowman that he needs sleep and the very basics of a social life, the two of them go to the tower over on the west pier and get baked on Michael’s stash.

It’s sort of great, except for the one teeny tiny fact that Michael’s somehow become Lochte’s plus one in all dressing downs and public call outs. And those happen way more often than not these days.

Basically, the problem with hanging out with Lochte is that everyone starts to believe that Michael is somehow responsible for handling all of Lochte’s weirdness and assorted douchery - yeah, some of his own too, whatever - so Michael keeps getting pulled aside and told to make Lochte stop using Atlantis’ preference for his gene to turn the eastern conference room into a club, complete with strobe light and hip-bumping beats.

(“You’re so weird,” Michael tells him, mouth dry from the pot and dazed by all the flashing lights. Ryan just winks at him and does the worst moonwalk Michael has ever seen before grabbing his crotch and calling out, high-pitched.)

It’s not even like they're the only bad examples out there. Michael’s pretty sure Khade’s running an excellent underground poker ring. Bernard and Kromowidjojo have been making what are either sex or murder eyes at each other for over a month now, constantly disappearing and reappearing looking like they’ve either had sweaty sex or a scuffle. It wouldn’t matter except for the fact that Lochte’s weirdness is a hundred times more potent given the way the city dotes on him.

The rest of them might have the best synthesized gene genetics can offer, but it looks like Atlantis can tell the difference between home-grown and grown in a lab, because she still prefers Lochte. All their devices prefer Lochte. And given that Lochte has the strongest expression of the ATA gene that they’ve got on the expedition, they’re all stuck with him wandering through the labs whenever he’s not on patrol duty, sitting in on debriefings while trying to figure out whatever he can about the Ancient devices they’re all excavating.

And it’s clear that Lochte is happy to help. When they first asked him, he’d all but puffed up with glee, his eyes darting over to Michael so he could wiggle his brows at him, before he snapped off a sharp salute to General Troy and said, “sir, yes, sir.”

It should’ve been a straightforward assignment, turning shit on and off and writing down what it does, but unfortunately things aren’t quite working out to be as simple as all that.

For one, Lochte doesn’t always know how he activates devices and isn’t particularly sure what they do once he’s got them looking glowy and/or whirring. For another, even when he does, his spelling is terrible.

(Khade once spends an entire day trying to figure out whether “blandair” was some sort of Ancient word or code for a secret device before Lochte clues him in by using it to mix some of the leafy vegetables the new gate team excavated on PR-8. Khade comes about as close to crying as Michael has ever seen, and Michael ends up hustling everyone from the lab and taking Khade over to the second sub-basement where the growing black market means they have at least a shot at finding booze. Khade spends the night drinking bathtub vodka, or what could be considered vodka given that the fruit came from LK-224 and tested as starch, before passing out half-way through his third round of screaming the word “blender” to the ceiling.)

But the largest problem with Lochte coming into contact with the devices is that he spends most of his time almost dying in increasingly strange and complex ways. Michael has no idea how he does it, after about a month of futzing with it, Lochte uses the same device to blow himself up twice before somehow turning himself into a cat on its third activation.

They end up having Cielo from genetics and Dr. Ye Shiwen, the no nonsense head of zoology, over to look at him. Shiwen examines Lochte quickly, takes his temperature and checks his teeth, his ears, and his eyes, before declaring him to be a perfectly healthy male cat and leaving abruptly, eager to get back to her lab. In contrast, Cielo hems and haws and takes a bunch of blood and fur samples for testing and DNA archival purposes.

Lochte spends the entire examination chittering at Michael and begging Cielo for scritches. When Cielo insists on being perfectly professional, Lochte turns around and shows Cielo his balls, shakes them in a clearly taunting manner. Michael breaks into snorting laughs at the sight of Cielo's face, and Lochte lets out a pleased meow, the smug shit.

Lochte stays a cat for a week and a half.

Even as a cat though, the city listens to him, opens doors and shifts panels so the there’s always a patch of sunlight pointed somewhere cozy. It even provides some sort of silica supplement that works like kitty litter. The geologists descend upon it with the glee of new discovery and confiscate a sample bag of the stuff in order to figure out if it’s synthesized by the city or naturally occurring. Lochte just curls his brown tail into a question mark and follows Michael to his labs so he can keep a careful eye on him until he falls asleep, curled up on the largest block of sinter deposit they’ve managed to excavate.

Lochte as a cat isn’t that bad. Michael almost gets used to the warm lump of him curled near his elbow, paw batting at Michael’s hand whenever he writes down anything Lochte thinks is hilarious. When Lochte disappears one day and comes back human, sheepishly hiding his junk under a filched lab coat, Michael isn’t disappointed precisely, but there’s a small ache of loss for the small body, the way Lochte’s paws would twitch while he sprawled out across Michael’s desk, asleep but still keeping him company. Michael tries not to dwell on it and drags Lochte off to show him the recently discovered indoor arboretum; the perfect place to grow a secret stash of weed.

Things being what they are, the experiments with the Ancient devices continue for a while after that. Khade starts to look increasingly hollow-eyed and Kromowidjojo claims she even sleeps with her can of flame retardant, both of them commiserating about how Lochte has driven them to drink. Michael’s sympathetic to their plight. His lab is next door to theirs, so he tends to wander over every so often when the walls reverberate with yet another explosion, alert to whether or not he can help.

When he does so this time, though, they’re over in a new section of the room, away from the part already covered in scorch marks, remnants from the various explosions these tests seem to engender. The three of them are crouched around a large bonfire, and Khade is poking at it with what looks like a broken table leg.

“All gone,” Khade says morosely when Michael walks over to join him, and Kromowidjojo finally turns around so he can see her red eyes and runny nose.

“He just… turned it on and it exploded our table,” she wails, hands buried in her masses of dark hair. “I had notes on that table. I had a bunch of equations about the levels of the shield scanner. I’ve been working on them for months. _Months_.” She’s wild-eyed and Michael backs away cautiously, but she just reaches past him to shake Khade.

“ _Months_ ,” she repeats, voice wet with tears and rage, and Khade looks sympathetic. He allows himself to be shaken, pats her awkwardly on the back.

When Michael looks over, Lochte’s still standing there and staring into the fire, fingers white where they clutch the Ancient device. Then he places the device on the table, gentle, like the device and he are both about to shatter, and flees.

They take a break after that. Kromowidjojo escapes to the mainland with one of the newer gate teams citing mental health days and Khade gets himself reassigned temporarily to one of the other labs. Lochte avoids everyone and volunteers for a bunch of patrols, looking miserable and hunted.

Eventually Michael can’t take it anymore. He ends up paying Bernard his entire stash of Twizzlers to change the rotation schedule and drags Lochte out to one of the discarded rooms. The place is a mess of discarded MRE cartons and fold-up beds that no one cares about, and Michael hands Lochte the glowy purple thing and tells him to go wild.

Lochte just looks at him, brow furrowed over miserable eyes, and Michael leans in and whispers, “We can bet on the number of explosions.”

Lochte cracks the smallest smile. “Yeah?” He whispers, voice choked, and Michael punches him in the shoulder and tells him to bring it.

They blow themselves up a whole bunch of times and accidentally set fire to the wall once.

“How is it even doing that?” Michael asks, eyes fixed on the way the flame is steady on the wall’s surface without anything actually burning or disintegrating. Lochte shrugs, strangely bashful.

Michael ends up taking a picture of the phenomenon with his phone. He trades that, along with an hour of Lochte’s next session, to the physicists for three Coronas and a box of chocolate raisins.

By the time Kromowidjojo comes back from the mainland, tanned and glowing, Lochte seems to have finally learned how to control the extremity of the device responses. They go through two more rounds of Lochte being turned into a cat, one where he’s a sentient cupboard, and one of Khade being turned into what the zoologists think is possibly a distant ancestor of the mule deer. Lochte tells everyone that it’s Michael’s ‘Power of the Bro’ that set him straight, and Kromowidjojo beams at Michael and offers him her firstborn to keep it that way.

Michael finds this hilarious all the way until Bowman takes him aside to inform him that until further notice, he’s on Lochte duty.

“He’s a good guy,” Bowman assures him, “and the two of you get along.” Bowman’s tone is less stating the facts and more these better be the facts or else. “You’ll be with him 24-7 and you’ll keep him out of trouble and stop him from blowing shit up.” He pauses here. “Well, more than he does during the lab tests anyway. The guy’s obviously trying but it’s clear he needs a keeper.”

Michael raises an eyebrow. “Don’t the soldiers normally guard the helpless scientists?” He doesn’t exactly mean to be difficult but he has work to do, and Lochte’s brand of chatty, happy, carnage, while fun to watch and laugh at, isn’t always conducive to work.

(There might also be the additional factor of Michael having taken to spending a whole bunch of his free time in his room with his hand down his pants spinning out a fantasy of licking strawberry milkshake off Lochte’s throat. “Jeah,” breathes imaginary Lochte when Michael trails his hand down his abs to get to his cock, and Michael is a sick, sick bastard for how that gets him off.)

He’s at the point where he’s praying that it’s just cabin fever and some sort of long-term exposure reaction to processed food or one of his fossils. He almost thinks he’d take the return of the fart fossil, now stored carefully in one of the airtight jars, to getting off on the way Lochte gets half the words of 'Can’t Touch This' wrong but is a pro at the Hammer dance.

Michael’s been spending his time trying not to think about it too much, except when he needs to get off and, well, everyone knows that doesn’t really count. So he’s isn’t _trying_ to be difficult when he snarks at Bowman; it’s more that he wants to leave this whole thing in the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t blow up my lab’ territory where it obviously belongs.

Bowman’s eye twitches, and then he smiles, grim and mean. “Have it your way, Phelps. Lochte,” - and Lochte snaps to attention and automatically salutes - “‘til I say otherwise, you’re on Phelps duty. You guys eat together, you sleep together, you work together. You get me?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Lochte barks out, though he’s grinning at Michael. “I’m all over Dr. Phelps.” He wiggles his eyebrows, fake leering.

Michael narrows his eyes at Lochte and then at Bowman, but neither of them seem to care. Lochte just grins even wider while Bowman rolls his eyes and leaves. “Try not to make too much trouble,” he says, and for the first time it sounds more plaintive than an order.

“Yessir,” Lochte waves him off but he’s already heading over to drape himself across Michael’s table, cat-like. Bowman just sighs and palms open the door.

“What’re you working on? More spermy plants?” He asks, and Michael has to snap back from staring at the way Lochte’s BDUs tighten across his ass and shoulders to respond.

He must make some kind of noise, because Lochte looks up at him when he smiles, eyes blue and lips chapped, and Michael’s mouth is dry with how much he wants to lean in and swipe his tongue over the texture of that skin.

"Sweet," Lochte says, and holds his fist out to bump. “Plants for the win! Come on, man, show me how botanists root around.” He waggles his eyebrows.

Michael snorts, though there’s a moment where he almost wants to take Lochte up on his offer, wants to push him down into the coarse, moist soil he’s spent so long dragging in, strangely high in oxygen and nitrogen, like the plants that grew there barely even used those elements, and take him apart. It’s nothing Lochte hasn’t said before, but Michael can’t go back to the blissful ignorance of pretending that the curl in his belly he’s been attributing to amusement or disgust this whole time isn’t anything other than arousal, the heat of it sliding through his veins.

He closes his eyes and mutters, "I need to calm myself." He needs some space to get a handle on the idea of Lochte being around him all the time, without necessarily finding the nearest empty room in which to think the door shut so he can finally pull his cock out, wet his hand with spit and go to fucking town until he comes.

He keeps his eyes shut, and breathes in heavily through his nose and out through his mouth.

Ryan sidles closer to him, claps a hand on his shoulder and says, voice grave, "Hey, if this is medicinal calming, I'm totally in, bro." And Michael has a minute where it seems like a brilliant idea to totally refuse, to tell Lochte that Michael’s stash is now off-limits, that he has to wait here until Michael finishes up and comes back. It would be a chance to leave Lochte and his want in this room; Michael could keep hoarding his secrets and his stash of weed like he did all the way over on the Daedalus. But then he thinks about how Lochte left alone is likely to either explode Michael’s lab or accidentally turn them all into walking pepperoni pizzas or something like that, and gives in.

He opens his eyes and and nods at Lochte, quips, “I always knew you would be, you mooch.” He ignores the way the answering smile made something heavy sit deep in his belly, walking the familiar path between his labs and the arboretum with Lochte at his shoulder.

* * *

 

Something shifts after that. Almost immediately Lochte completely stops accidentally blowing shit up, and he blushes really red and ugly down his cheeks and over his neck when Michael comments on it.

He still accidentally turns people into stuff though. Walters spends nearly a whole fortnight as a giant talking snake, amusing himself by wrapping around Pierson and staring into his eyes while singing, “trusssst in me, jusssssst in me” while Pierson alternately laughs and groans before dumping him off. But Michael’s starting to hear stories about the shit that goes on off-world with the gate teams. Turning into a non-human whatever every so often sounds a lot better to Michael than the stories of MK-227 where Corporal García and her team managed to insult an entire village by not speaking in perfectly dactylic rhymes, resulting in their being chased back to the gate by a mob of angry performance poets.

It really isn’t like he has anything to do with it it all, but now Bowman and General Troy occasionally make eye contact in the mess hall and smile at Michael. Even Khade has taken to letting the two of them sit at his table instead of making throat slitting gestures in Lochte’s direction from across the mess hall.

For a given value of strange, Michael doesn’t really think there’s anything precisely wrong with taking some of the credit and soaking in a little appreciation. It’s not like anyone is queuing up to pat him on the back for discovering that the soil samples indicate that Ancients likely didn’t have a whole bunch of conifers growing in their backyard. Taking credit for Lochte living and leaving everyone else alive isn’t hurting anyone. Plus, it feels good.

“It’s like I’m your lucky charm,” he gloats to Lochte.

Lochte leans in to wrap an arm around Michael’s shoulder before he says, in the world’s worst Irish accent, “then you’d better take care. They’re always after me lucky charms.”

Michael snorts because he can’t help himself, and Lochte hoots in his ear.

“The two of you are sickening,” Khade informs them, grimacing around his peanut butter sandwich. He squints at them while he swallows, and then takes a hand off his sandwich to point at Lochte. “You might as well get on a gate team. That way the two of you can finally marry each other and let me eat my sandwich in peace.”

“Does that really happen?” Michael ignores the rest of Khade’s pronouncement because that joke is pretty common these days. He’s curious about the gate teams though; there are all these stories floating around about shootings and marriages and that weird one about Meilutytė having an orgy with two village elders and her entire team.

Michael’s seen the way her team looks at her now and the wide, smug smile she graces some of the other geneticists with, so maybe it’s somewhere in the realm of truth. He and his penis would certainly like to think so.

“Phelps can’t wear white,” Lochte says, solemn, “I’ll never have my dream wedding.”

Khade chokes.

“ _What_?” Michael has no idea what part of that he’s supposed to deal with. Khade looks like he’s about to die choking, but it would be a gleeful death and a moral victory, so Michael maybe thumps him a little harder than he absolutely has to until Khade finally swallows enough air to fight him off.

“Sperm plants, dude, sperm plants,” Lochte tells him, like this somehow makes all the sense in the world. He shuffles about a little bit on the bench and raps, “Jizz in the air, jizz in my hair, come on the bees ‘cause the bees don’t care.”

Michael stares at him for a second, dumbstruck, and Lochte throws his hands in the air and sings, “Jeeeeeah!” And Michael can’t stop the stupid honking laughs that breaks out of him.

“So I’m what? A bee?” He gasps out, holding his aching stomach, and Lochte finger guns at him. “Bro, you’re the freaking bee’s knees. Gimme two minutes and that purple glowy thing again, and we’ll make it a reality.”

The two of them stare at each other for a second before Lochte’s mouth wobbles, and then they collapse back into gales of laughter.

Michael finds himself struggling to breathe and Lochte is hooting and thumping the table. It gets that much worse when Khade loftily informs them, “The two of you sicken me.”

He waits them out though, lets the two of them wheeze in the aftermath, small giggles still breaking out, when he suggests, “If you do get on a gate team, try to get married on PX-159. I hear they do some nice booze and the newlyweds get to spend a night in a treehouse.” His voice shades towards envy at the end, and that sets Michael off again.

“Thanks for letting us know, man,” Michael says when he can finally gulp enough air in to speak. “We’ll get right on that.”

“On that,” Lochte sings, high-pitched in his best Justin Timberlake, and the two of them collapse into giggles again.

“You idiots deserve each other,” Khade tells them, and Michael pulls the tab of his diet cola can off so he can stick it on Lochte’s finger.

“There, I put a ring on it,” he says.

“Magic,” Lochte tells him, before he turns to show Khade the steel ring around his finger. “I’m his Beyonce and he’s my Jay-Z.”

Khade rolls his eyes and throws the cover of his MRE at them.

“Don’t worry, babe,” Lochte tells him, pulling Michael into his side, “he’s just green like lime.”

* * *

 

They’re still laughing when they wander back down the corridors. Michael leads them outside to the path that lets them look out across the water as they walk back to their quarters. It’s warm out, and quiet, and their laughter trails off, leaves Michael feeling tired and content. A breeze blows cool across the water, and Michael closes his eyes and lifts his face into it, breathes deep before he lets out a long, happy sigh.

When he opens his eyes again, Lochte’s smiling at him. It’s his normal smile, teeth gleaming while his dimples push grooves in his cheeks, except that Lochte drops his gaze to as he touches the ring-tab he’s still got on his finger. He fiddles with it, still smiling but almost distant now, before he shoots Michael a look from under his lashes.

It’s strange but suddenly Michael’s having some trouble deciphering the way Lochte seems unsure even while he’s waggling his brows over at Michael and insisting that he’s going to show him a good time. He thought he’d become conversant in Lochte-speak sometime over the last four months that they’ve spent together, living in each other’s space, but it’s like Lochte’s suddenly switched to a whole different language somewhere between the mess hall and the path they’re now taking home. Michael doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to bump Lochte’s shoulder with his fist, or if he should maybe push Lochte up against the wall and take him up on the offer. Lochte’s awkwardness is rubbing off on Michael, and, heh, rubbing off.

Yeah, okay, Lochte is rubbing off on him. Not officially yet, but it’s there. It’s coming.

It’s like he can finally see the way Lochte’s dropped roots into Atlantis and into Michael, like the damn lycopods that don’t quite fit the pattern but exist nonetheless. Michael’s hot with it, desperate with it, wants to push Lochte up against a wall and show him everything Michael’s been dreaming about for all these months of shitty MREs and explosions and fistbumps.

So he does.

He uses his height to muscle Lochte over against the wall, staring him down when Lochte startles and then, after having a look at Michael’s face, laughs. “Took you long enough. I thought I’d have to get a pimp in the air or something for you to read it.”

Michael pauses from where he’s been leaning in to finally, _finally_ kiss Lochte and says, voice as bland as he can make it, “Pimp?”

Lochte mutters, “Yeah, yeah, like at the football game with the big signs,” and pulls Michael in to kiss him, lips chapped and opening up under Michael’s. Michael huffs a laugh into the kiss and feels Lochte’s mouth stretch wide under his, smiling back.

“Jeah,” he whispers playfully, just this once. Lochte’s shoulders shake under his hands even as his smiling mouth drops soft, lush kisses until Michael is breathless, ‘til Michael feels like he’s learned all the ins and outs of this, their new language.

* * *

 

The two of them stumble into Michael’s lab the next day, hair dishevelled and BDUs rumpled, only to find Khade and Kromowidjojo waiting for them. She’s got a clipboard in hand and he has a box of Ancient devices at the ready, and Michael guesses that they must look pretty terrible given how much Kromowidjojo is gaping at them.

She finally snaps her mouth shut and blurts out, “What the hell happened to you guys?”

Lochte shoots Michael what is probably the smuggest look he’s ever seen on man or cat, and brandishes the pull-tab ring which he put back on this morning. “Wedding night.”

Michael backs him up. “It was pretty traditional,” he says, tongue in cheek, “By the end of it both of us were wearing white.”

Lochte beams at him. Khade’s making vomiting noises and Kromowidjojo looks like she’d love for someone to explain whatever the hell is going on, but Lochte’s looking back at him and Michael finds he can’t help himself, doesn’t even really want to.

“Hey man,” he says, feeling that hot curl in his belly unfold into something warm and steady, “let’s go talk to Troy about a gate team. Let’s you and me go out there and conquer the world.”

“Holy fuck, _jeah_!” crows Lochte. “Let’s reach for the moon and become fucking stars!”

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:
> 
> *Kaddu ke aulaad [Hindi]: Son of a pumpkin; an idiot who is so stupid his parents must've been pumpkins. 
> 
> **Ghadav [Marathi]: Donkey; stupid, stubborn.


End file.
